Diagram illustrating auditory perception: three sound-generating events (fork hitting plate, chair scraping, liquid pouring) transmit through an outdoor environment to the ear, with the brain performing perceptual inference to interpret both the direct sounds and their environmental context.

Perception is the brain’s process of interpreting sensory information. For instance, sounds are generated by physical events in the world around us. When we listen to such sounds, what we perceive is an estimate of their physical causes. (Fig. 5 from McDermott, Agarwal, and Traer, “Physics, Ecological Acoustics and the Auditory System,” Current Biology 34, no. 20 (2024). Courtesy of Elsevier, Inc., https://www.sciencedirect.com. Used with permission.)

McDermott, Agarwal, and Traer, “Physics, Ecological Acoustics and the Auditory System,” Current Biology 34, no. 20 (2024): fig. 5.